Re: Opining on "modern" development practices (was Re: Merging the “binary” NPM importer?)

[Katherine Cox-Buday <cox.katherine.e@gmail.com>]

Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> writes:

> Nope!  You’ve probably noticed that the Hurd isn’t known as a lively and
> successful project, and then there are things like the Critique¹ or work
> on porting the Hurd to the L4 microkernel which, while showing the
> “right” direction research-wise, have also had IMO the effect of
> suggesting that it’s never going to be good enough.
>
> I think a project needs to be aware of its shortcomings, but it also
> needs achievable milestones, and it needs to refrain from elitism.
>
> ¹ http://walfield.org/papers/200707-walfield-critique-of-the-GNU-Hurd.pdf

Yes, I'm generally aware of the challenges the Hurd (and other micro kernels) have had taking off. I'm not clear on whether this is because monolithic kernels are intrinsically better (is this yet another example of worse is better?), or because of an organizational expression of worse is better.

I happened to be watching John Carmack speak last night. I haven't watched many of his talks, but he seems like a consummate pragmatist. I've always admired people like this because it's so opposite of my own idealistic tendencies. One thing he said in particular seems relevant:

https://youtu.be/BnSUk0je6oo?t=883
"The metaverse is a honeypot trap for astronaut architects."

I.e. he was arguing against trying to build (read: architect) the metaverse because it's a great way to either not get anything useful done, or to get the wrong thing done.

I guess I've been circling around this philosophy for awhile, but I think I'm going to let it cross over into being my working theory of how to build useful software (among other things in life): worse is better, and collect as many forcing factors as you can, as early as you can. I wonder how I can apply this to Guix.

> See <https://issues.guix.gnu.org/49169>.

Thank you for the link!

-- 
Katherine